Want to build yourself an awesome gaming PC for $500? Say hello to the Photon.
Hey guys this is Austin and today I'm here with my latest build, the Photon. With a budget
of $500, you're looking at a PC that can handle games at 1080p without breaking a sweat. Run
it through the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark which is a good general test of a gaming PCs
performance and here the Photon stacks up nicely against some of my other builds. Take
a look at Battlefield 4 and we've got a solid 48 frames per second running on High at 1080p.
Jump over to Metro: Last Light, a game that's not only fun but also incredibly demanding
and here we're able to run things on Normal at 46 FPS. With Bioshock Infinite things can
be bumped up to Very High settings and still get a nice and smooth 54 frames per second.
If you like racing games Grid 2 is a fun choice and the Photon handles it nicely on Ultra
at 43 FPS. And because I know you guys are going to ask I did try running Watch Dogs
on the Photon. So I was able to get it running decently on Medium settings at 1080p however
I was seeing some pretty decent stuttering which unfortunately I've seen on basically
all versions of the PC right now, so for more in-depth benchmarking I'm going to wait until
we at least see some patches or some driver updates to kind of address that but it is
playable on the Photon. Now let's take a closer look at all the parts that make up the Photon
starting with the case which is the new Corsair SPEC-01. This is a full sized ATX chassis
with a big window along with a front LED fan. As a Corsair case it's nice and easy to work
in and about the only thing I wish it had was a second exhaust fan but that's an easy
enough upgrade. For the processor the Photon is using an AMD Athlon X4 760K. It delivers
a quad core design clocked at up to 4.1GHz which is a good fit for 1080p gaming. I have
lost track of how many budget gaming PCs I've built using Athlons as they're rock solid
CPUs that can even be overclocked. On the graphics side we've got a Sapphire Radeon
R7 260X. This is a great card with support for things like AMD's Mantle and TrueAudio
along with 2 gigabytes of memory which is getting more and more important these days.
Take a look at the motherboard and we've got an MSI A78M-E35. This is another one of my
go-to choices that accepts up to 16 gigabytes of RAM, has both USB 3.0 and SATA 3 along
with support for Kaveri. For storage we've got what in my opinion is the best hard drive
for a gaming PC build, the Western Digital Caviar Black. With 1 terabyte of capacity
this is the next best thing to an SSD and it's going to cost you a lot less. On the
memory side the Photon uses 8 gigabytes of Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM. Clocked at 1600MHz
this is great stuff for gaming and since it comes in a single DIMM you can always add
another to bump up memory up to 16 gigabytes later on. I feel like a broken record here
as I've only used these things a million times before but for the power supply we have the
Corsair CX430. These are a great choice that are not only going to be reliable and efficient
but they also give you plenty of power to handle the system as is as well as with some
additional upgrades later on. Put it all together and the Photon is a killer gaming PC that
doesn't break the bank. Even though the Photon is around $500 as of recording this video
things change all the time so I'll have up to date links of everything I talked about
in the description of this video over on my website so definitely go check that out. Anyway
huge shoutout to Hulu Plus for making this video possible! You've probably tried Hulu
on your computer but Hulu Plus is so much more. With Hulu Plus you can watch current
season episodes of your favorite shows like The Colbert Report, Shark Tank and Family
Guy along with every episode of shows like Naruto, South Park and Doctor Who. Another
show I've been really been enjoying is Cosmos and you guys can find the entire season over
on Hulu Plus! For only $7.99 a month you can get your shows any time and any where. Considering
that's like a quarter a day, it is so worth it. Just go to huluplus.com/austin and you'll
be able to try it out for free for two weeks and help support the channel. Again that's
huluplus.com/austin so definitely go check it out and start streaming TV today. Anyway
guys thank you so much for watching and I will catch you in the next one!